Gambling industry reaches the saturation point

It hasn't taken long for saturation to arrive in the gambling industry.Except for a few places — primarily Texas — “there aren't many places in the United States where a player can't drive three hours or less to get to a casino, a panel of gaming industry executives concluded in a wide-ranging panel on industry issues,” according to a post from VegasInc.com.“New England is saturated,” Penn National Gaming president Tim Wilmott said during the panel. “The market is crowded in Ohio. It's a little underserved in Florida.”Panelists said the relative saturation of the market means growth will occur by acquisition and mergers and possibly diversification into the online world, according to the story.

Detroit needs all the good ideas it can get these days, and it's looking to Cleveland as a model for allowing urban animal farming — which could lead to sheep mowing parts of the city.

After a presentation this week about how sheep are used for turf management in a Cleveland pilot program, three members of Detroit's Planning and Economic Development/Neighborhood and Community Services standing committees voted to move forward with studying the idea, The Detroit Free Press reports.The newspaper says the move came after Laura DeYoung, an environmental planning consultant and head of Urban Shepherds, outlined how sheep are used to mow grass on a 5-acre plot of land in Cleveland.“The group's pilot project is visible from I-90 just east of downtown, near the East 55th Street Marina,” the newspaper notes. “About three dozen sheep and a llama that helps protect them graze the land from May through mid-October. The undeveloped property is in an area void of houses, bordered by an apartment building, Lake Erie and I-90.”Ms. DeYoung says volunteer shepherds are trained to handle the sheep, rotating the animals so they don't over-eat and strip the grass.“It sounds corny, but people flock to the site. Lolly the Trolley goes by. There are people biking and hiking by,” says Ms. DeYoung, who notes Detroit could start a similar project for less than $20,000.

“Nearly two years after pulling out of selling books through OverDrive and over a year after it started slowly experimenting selling e-books to libraries in a limited way, 17,000 digital titles from the world's largest publisher will again be available for purchase,” DigitalBookWorld.com reports.The website says that, like with Random House — which, along with Penguin, is now Penguin Random House, the world's largest publisher — “front-list titles will be priced higher than what consumers pay and back-list titles will be less expensive.”OverDrive's post about the situation is here.

Forbes.com crunches some numbers to come up with a team of baseball's most underpaid players this year, one member of which is Cleveland Indians outfielder Ryan Raburn.The site leans heavily on a measure called Wins Above Replacement, or WAR — the number of wins a player is calculated to have contributed to his team above that of a minimum salaried replacement.Mr. Raburn, who's making just $1 million, has a strong WAR of 2.3, based on his 16 homers and .924 OPS (on-base plus slugging) in 263 plate appearances.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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